


Dedication

by piecesofalice



Category: In Plain Sight, Life
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:52:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piecesofalice/pseuds/piecesofalice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two different men, two different dedications, one absolute meaning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dedication

"You dedicated a song to me."

  
"Yes."

  
"On the radio."

  
"_Yes._"

  
"'Everybody Dance Now' by C&amp;C Music Factory?"

  
"Yes."

  
Dani narrowed her eyes and watched her boyfriend reading the newspaper like she'd not even spoken.

  
Then, she pulled it away from him and took him to bed like he deserved, not even stopping to get his pants off all the way or when he let out the chorus of the song that had made her love him just that little bit more.

  
\---

  
To say Charlie reminded her of Marshall was like saying Canada was like North America. Close enough for foreigners to get confused, but different enough to distinguish in her mind that you _can't go back_, even when poutine was on offer.

  
No, really, because Charlie and Marshall were like fries and gravy and cheese and she was a recovering alcoholic and no doubt this all linked up somewhere in her brain, but it was all still a little fried from the excess and lies and late nights with a needle in her arm.

  
She'd stand in front of the mirror in the mornings, her hair wet and her face bare, and wondered if she'd always be a recovering junkie cop who'd somehow gotten a second chance at everything but the happy life she'd left behind. Because that was the reality - a fiance, a home and a career, a love and a depth of purpose that was seeded in faith and a man who made her toast in the shape of hearts that gave into a terror trip into hell and ended with him slipping his hand out of hers in the white walled rooms of a rehab clinic.

  
But really? He didn't give up on her. She gave up on him.

  
Just like Charlie's wife, in a different prison in a different way.

  
\---

  
The tiny similarities made her eyes crease at the corners, like she that time she thought she saw her high school best friend one morning and had lifted her hand to say hi.

  
But no, it wasn't them but another woman with a far pointier nose, so she had to go back to drinking her coffee, black, alone, against the faux wood grain of a crap diner round the corner from her house and hope that no-one noticed how that one desperate gesture seemed to sum up the last two years in one go.

  
Charlie came with her, some mornings, and she (however reluctantly) felt better. Because, on those mornings she was feeling self-indulgently pitiful, it was like a tiny apartment off Hollywood where the gas cut out constantly and the neighbours fought over what crappy game show they were going to watch.

  
And. It was nice.

  
Bitter, but nice, and she looked out the window to see the sun.

  
\---

  
He never knew, never asked. That was the biggest difference, because Marshall couldn't leave enough alone while Charlie seemed to understand the need for silence at the end of a heavy sentence.

  
Both loved to talk, until she felt her ears were bleeding, and while Marshall-Dani could smile and push the chatter into soft pillows and blue-grey sheeting, Charlie-Dani tried to hold her face together in a mask of doe-eyes and messy hair because _you can't go back_.

  
Even when looking into blue eyes and pale skin of a haunted man who seemed to understand her more and more everyday without saying a word.

  
\---

  
Sometimes, when the cable was out and the trees were black, she'd hold her cell phone and just breathe.

  
Because she had held everything but it wasn't enough, because she had nothing but a job and a partner and a past to live up to, because Marshall-her-ex still texted her with the meaning of "palaver" while Charlie-her-partner spoke it into her ears over coffee and she wondered how she managed to find the two men in the entire universe who had a subscription to Word of the Day.

  
Her mother would speak of circles and serpents, and Dani kind of began to understand.

  
\---

  
"You dedicated me a song."

  
"It's your birthday."

  
"You dedicated me a song. On the radio."

  
"Yes."

  
"'Blackbird' by The Beatles."

  
"Yep."

  
Dani Reese thought of what goes around, comes around; a ratty apartment and a man who's hair had a life of it's own on a Sunday morning, and smiled.

  
\---

  
_Fin._

  
\---


End file.
